"I want to know what's behind your face," Jean Seberg purrs to Jean-Paul Belmondo midway through the landmark 1960 French film "Breathless." "I've looked at it for 10 minutes and I still know nothing, nothing."

Neither do we. Belmondo's face, magnificently planed and sloped as it is, tells us zilch in this movie. Newly restored and re-subtitled for its 50th anniversary, the story of a thug marooned in Paris that helped launch a new cinematic style is, in fact, an inadvertent ode not to Belmondo's looks, but to his body.

I say "inadvertent" because, tragically (eh oui, one cannot overdramatize when referring to a French film), director Jean-Luc Godard does not fully exploit Belmondo's gift of physical grace. "Breathless" loses air every time it opts for close-ups. But let Belmondo saunter downstairs while he's lighting one of his fat cigarettes, or swagger through a lobby, or shadowbox in his underwear, and the film hums with raw, freewheeling elegance.

We don't see a lot of male grace in films nowadays -- built-up bulk and a punchier, more robust aesthetic have taken its place. Go back to the 1950s and, particularly in the art films, there's a subtler, more detailed attention to the male form and its ability to express emotion. Belmondo may not be as polished as a Cary Grant nor as sensuously sculpted as a Marlon Brando. His character in "Breathless" is perfectly hateful -- a petty thief who sees himself as a classy tough even as he's robbing and insulting his girlfriends. But what's fascinating is that the way he carries himself tells us something entirely different.

We fall in love with this lowlife not because of his lines or his story but because of his moves. He bursts with an endearing, boyish energy, light-footed and carefree, fed by the restless motor of a dreamer. The jacked-up optimism in the way Belmondo moves tells us his character has heart, wit and promise, even if his words convey the very opposite.

Belmondo plays Michel, who heads to Paris from Marseille in a stolen car to a) retrieve money he is owed and b) lure his sometime girlfriend Patricia (Seberg) into running away with him to Rome. A romantic with a psychopathic streak, he ends up killing a policeman in a highway stop. Fugitive status only energizes him; once he reaches Paris, Michel is in open pursuit of Patricia, the guy who owes him the cash and his own notion of noirish glamour.

"After all, I am a jerk," Michel mutters to himself. But it's not a confession; it's self-flattery, spoken with pride -- and with an unfiltered Boyard between those bluefish lips.

You could almost choke on all the smoke in this film, but the most visceral effect is that of Belmondo in motion. Otherwise, Godard's anti-technique makes for a film with no momentum. Historic as it is -- "Breathless" was a leader of the radical French New Wave movement, with its rejection of exacting rehearsals and locked-down scripts -- there's nothing so breathless here as its star and his dancerlike beauty.

It's too bad Godard didn't linger more on Belmondo's natural ease of movement, because rawness was exactly what the director was after. The film is known for Godard's jump-cuts, the long takes on Paris side streets and the more or less improvised dialogue. But with its meandering narrative and slapdash script, the work would scarcely merit attention outside film schools all these years later without Belmondo, his ease of locomotion, the athlete's precision and timing.